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A French mother left her asthmatic toddler in an unheated nightclub storeroom so she could party until the early hours of the morning. It's just the latest example of mums behaving badly that has shocked France.

A French mother was behind bars at the weekend after police found her drunk after having left her two-year-old, asthmatic son in the unheated storeroom of a nightclub so she could go and dance.

Someone at the club called police to report that the mother, in her 30s, was at the Sunset Boulevard nightclub in Saint-Omer, northern France on Sunday and had taken her young son with her. When officers arrived they found the child wrapped up in a jacket and in a folding cot (crib) in the storeroom at the club.

“What stands out is that she (the mother) had a lot to drink,” Saint-Omer prosecutor Sébastien Piève told French paper La Voix du Nord. “It was a very small, unheated room containing a pile of stored items, a sort of stockroom where it was about ten degrees. A child doesn’t belong there, especially one who is asthmatic.”

The little boy, who was in the storeroom for several hours, was taken to the hospital to get checked out and appeared to be fine. His mother, however, is in a lot of trouble.

After being taken to the drunk tank at around 5am on Monday to sober up, she was expected to be locked up on suspicion of child abandonment. If convicted she could face a spell behind bars.

It wasn’t clear how police learned of the situation, but a witness told La Voix du Nord that other people at the club had warned the mother it was no place for a child. The manager of the nightclub was also taken away for questioning, presumably over in relation to how the mother was able to get access to the storeroom.

This is the latest in a string of stories in the French press of mum’s behaving badly. In February a French mother was accused of leaving her child home alone while she hit the town.

And prior to that police reported an even worse case in which three young children were left at home alone while their mother went out to party. The eldest of the three children, a four-year-old, had her ankle tied to a cot with a sock so she couldn't leave, French daily Le Figaro reported.